Allen Lane signs 'radically ambitious' history from James Clark in 'heated' nine-way auction

Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Random, has signed a "radically ambitious" book by historian James Clark in a "heated" nine-way auction. Tom Penn, publishing director at Penguin Press, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Monasterium: The Making of Medieval Europe from Tom Killingbeck at A.M. Heath. Allen Lane will publish the book in spring 2026.

The synopsis reads: "In this groundbreaking new book, James Clark allows us to experience monastic life at ground level, showing that far from places of uniform conformity, monasteries were centres of power, culture and radicalism. They provided an inversion of social norms for women, who were able to live lives outside of the rigid strictures of mainstream society and gave birth to ideas both cosmological and theological but also practical, social and even technological: after all it was in the monasteries that Europe first learned how mechanically to measure time. To understand the Middle Ages, we must recover the monasteries’ leading role and their enduring legacy."

Clark is a professor of history at Exeter University and the author of many academic books and papers on medieval and early modern culture and religion. His previous work includes his 2021 book The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History (Yale UP), and Monasterium is his trade debut.

Clark said: "I’m privileged to be publishing Monasterium with Tom Penn and his colleagues at Penguin Press with their unrivalled reputation for recounting histories of scale and scope. I hope readers will join in the journey and share in a new experience of the medieval world. The traces and echoes of convents and cloisters they find in their own neighbourhood will be transformed."

Penn added: "James Clark is a wonderful historian and writer, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome him to Allen Lane with this original and radically ambitious project. Monasterium leads the reader into the European Middle Ages with vivid immediacy and in doing so, shows us a world that’s entirely different from the one we thought we knew. In restoring monasteries to their position at the centre of the medieval landscape, James draws on a wealth of material evidence to recreate this world in all its full, intimate humanity. Monasterium will, quite simply, transform our understanding of the Middle Ages."